Shanghai and Suzhou: Trip to China with my mom

This is the second part of my multipart photo album of my recent trip playing tourguide to my mom in China. You can see the first part (Hong Kong) here.

Shanghai was the first stop of our trip into China. I've been to Shanghai many, many times at this point so I wasn't too concerned about finding interesting places to travel with my mom. I especially wanted to take her to nearby Hangzhou (tomorrow's photo album).

My largest concern about her coming to China wasn't that she wouldn't enjoy it or about playing tourguide. My largest concern was about her stomach -- 水土不服 -- or not used to the water and food. Everyone new to China will get sick at some point -- partially because of the hygiene differences and partially because of the impulse to eat all of the delicious street food. In this case, I decided on a strategy of taking her to the cleaner, more organized restaurants earlier in the trip and ease her stomach gradually to the farm-fresh food that we'd eventually be eating in Wuyishan and the seafood that we'd be eating in Xiamen.

I also decided to forego the tourguides and do most of the tourguiding myself -- especially in Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Xiamen where I've been plenty of times. Well, actually, it required a bit of preparation -- each time that I went to Shanghai or Hangzhou was always for some kind of business-related trip -- never for fun. Last January, in preparation for playing tourguide, I went back to Shanghai to meet up with my friend Jasmine who lived in Shanghai all her life until she moved to the UK a year ago. I basically spent two or three days finally doing the cheesy, touristy thing in Shanghai and Hangzhou and sucking up as much knowledge as I could before doing the same thing for my mom this time around. Thanks a million, Jasmine! I felt like an expert when showing my mom around!

Shanghai pretty much only has a limited number of places to visit for touristy stuff: The Bund, Xintiandi, Yu Yuan Laojie, Shanghai Museum...

Suzhou was interesting -- we met up with my friend Jason because he wanted to see the new I.M. Pei-designed Suzhou Museum. I had an extensive schedule planned where we'd visit two gardens, the museum, and the Tongli water town. In the end, we went to one garden, had an overly long hot pot lunch, and then found that everything (including the museum) was closed. Well, I'm not really a huge fan of gardens in Suzhou so it didn't feel like that much of a loss. Sorry Jason!!! He went all the way to Suzhou with us and didn't even get to get into the museum...

Oh, one recommendation in Shanghai: Thanks to Jasmine the find! Go to The Panorama Hotel (in 海湾大厦) near where Waibai Duqiao used to be (外白渡桥) and go to the top floor -- there's a coffeehouse with a huge bay window that overlooks both Puxi and Pudong... an amazing view -- photos in the album below. We waited there from 8pm to past 9pm for the lights in Puxi to turn on. These days, I think they only turn them on for five minutes during the weekdays so I took a quick snapshot...